


sick lab rats like me

by eggsmonday



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Hurt No Comfort, Pre-Game Oma Kokichi, Spoilers, introspective, it's spelled ouma not oma because im not a fucking heathen, slightly purple prose because im a drama queen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-03
Updated: 2020-02-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:54:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22546624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eggsmonday/pseuds/eggsmonday
Summary: As much as he laughs, he has never been so naive as to be unafraid of death.(Kokichi Ouma, from age 12 to 17.)
Relationships: Gokuhara Gonta & Oma Kokichi, Momota Kaito & Oma Kokichi, Oma Kokichi & Saihara Shuichi
Comments: 2
Kudos: 66





	sick lab rats like me

**Author's Note:**

> title is taken from "an antidote for strychnine" by the mountain goats

When Kokichi is twelve years old, he walks home from school through the drizzly streets alone. He is pale and skinny, all knobby knees and elbows. Bird-boned, people used to call him. He wears too-big black clothes, trying to hide as much of himself in their cozy darkness as he can. Beneath them, his skin is mottled with bruises like watercolor. Purple and sickly. The soft part of his cheeks right below his eyes is the same--violets in bloom. He hates that color.

✧✧✧

When Kokichi is fifteen years old, he meets a boy that seems to tolerate his company. This boy has long hair that hangs limp, as if it's always wet, and a lanky body that puberty has pulled on like an elastic. The boy’s eyes are amber and shifty, darting back and forth beneath his long sweeping lashes and the bill of his cap. He blushes and sweats more than anyone Kokichi has ever met before. But Kokichi does not mind. This is his first friend.

Kokichi’s friend chatters endlessly about how much he loves _Danganronpa._ Kokichi does not love _Danganronpa_ . He does not even like _Danganronpa_ . He thinks it’s tasteless. But his new friend likes it-- _loves_ it--and so Kokichi will learn to like it, too. This other boy talks and talks about how badly he wants to audition for his favorite television program. He wants to be a detective, and he has all these _plans_ for how he’ll kill. The gleam in his eye makes Kokichi feel sick, but the thought of losing the only person to ever show him kindness makes him sicker. So he says, "I'll play too."

Anything, anything, to not be left behind.

✧✧✧

When Kokichi is sixteen, he stammers miserably through an audition for a part he doesn’t want. When they ask him what he’d like to be, he says, "Anything other than what I am."

✧✧✧

When Kokichi is seventeen, every single thought is emptied from his head, siphoned like so much toxic gasoline. He is left hollow, and he stares dazedly around at a group of people just as hollow as he. Not a single one of their faces looks at all familiar.

✧✧✧

He is off-putting to the others from the very beginning. He can sense it in the way that they peer down their noses at him. He doesn’t _mean_ to cultivate this persona. Not at first, anyway. But when he realizes that he has become the figure onto which they all project their hatred for the game, he knows he can take advantage of it.

A small bird inside him chirps its loneliness, but he crushes the feeling under his heel, grinding it into the dust until all that is left is a blot of viscera and a few loose feathers.

(He pretends that the birdsong has stopped.)

Surviving the game isn’t enough. He has to _win_ . At first, he’d thought winning would be making it through with a smile on his face. But now he knows that he was wrong, and that that’s not winning at all. Winning is beating the mastermind. He’ll use the hatred of his classmates to his advantage. That’s what being a Supreme Leader is, isn’t it? Rallying the masses against a cause. And it will be so, so easy to convince them that _he_ is the cause to be rallied against. They’re already halfway there anyway.

So he slides a knife into Gonta’s back.

✧✧✧

At Gonta’s trial, he sheds tears. 

The guilt and the regret and the _grief_ send him spiralling, and in front of everyone, too. _I killed him. I killed him._ When he’d run with DICE, his one great rule barred violence and death. It was a hard-and-fast part of life with his secret society, and now he’d broken that rule.

In those heated post-trial moments, he desperately begs Monokuma to take his life instead of Gonta’s, knowing there’s no way that Monokuma would be so kind. “If I could’ve done this myself, I would’ve,” he insists shakily to the others.

But doubt tugs at him. _Is it true? If Iruma hadn’t targeted me specifically, or if she hadn’t included the fail-safe… would I have killed her myself?_

If he had been executed, he would have been unable to carry out his plan. Ultimately, he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know. Would he have accepted his death, if that had been an option? Or would he have still manipulated someone else into doing his dirty work for him? The guilt returns one hundredfold when he realizes that he would not have let himself die in Gonta’s stead. His classmates need him. As terrible as it is to weigh one life against another, he knows that he is more valuable. Gonta doesn’t have what it takes to end the game.

But now, Kokichi might.

Killing Gonta was an unforgivable crime. But he doesn’t want forgiveness. Not Gonta’s, not anyone else’s. He wants them to _hate_ him. Gonta’s murder has opened a new door for him. Damn it all if he won’t use this opportunity--what Gonta has left him--to free everyone else.

So he dries his eyes and backpedals on his words, retaking the mantle of _villain_.

He cackles: “You think I’d cry for that idiot?”

✧✧✧

Saihara’s tone is biting. “You’re alone, Kokichi,” he says, “and you always will be.” The words puncture Kokichi’s frail body like poison-tipped arrows. They pierce all the way through him easily, slotting themselves in the gaps between his vertebrae. He’s not sure _why_ Saihara is so different from the others. He’s not sure why he cares about Saihara’s opinion above everyone else’s. He’s not sure why those words are so deadly to him. How does Saihara have such capacity for making Kokichi feel _small_?

And he _is_ small. He is too skinny. Bird-boned, they used to call him.

In school, they taught him that birds have hollow bones to enable them to take flight. But that’s a lie. Bird bones are not hollow--they are full of branching spicules that provide strength, like scaffolding. Kokichi didn’t know. He didn’t know that the extra support is necessary. Brittle bones, with nothing but air to fill them, are dangerous. 

Saihara’s words knock him from the sky. 

When he eventually hits the ground, everything in him shatters.

✧✧✧

“You kept saying how fun this game was,” Momota says, and Kokichi isn’t sure whether to roll his eyes or to applaud his own performance.

_Did he really not see through it? Did any of them?_

Kokichi wonders how he should reply. He entertains, briefly, the idea of keeping up the facade. He had worked hard to keep cultivating this image for himself. _The role of villain is perfect for me._ Death games are meant to be watched, and up until this moment, he has always played off moments where the mask dropped as if they were jokes. ( _Who cares about that idiot? I’d never cry for Gonta!_ ) Because if the audience--whomever they may be--thinks for even a second that he may be honestly frightened, he will have already lost.

He has to be _real_. He has to be a madman, has to push the others to their breaking points, has to sacrifice his values for the sake of the game. For the sake of winning. What’s an actor? Boring. Don’t just play the role. Outsmarting the mastermind necessitates full immersion.

But that’s all over now. He doesn’t have to play pretend. In these few moments, now that the game is ending--for him, anyway--he can afford honesty. He won’t be around to see the fallout.

_Fun. Ha._ “That was a lie… obviously.” Kokichi drags the words from his throat, the effort of speaking nearly too great already as wicked Strike-9 sluices through him. “H-How could a game… where people die… be fun..?”

And that’s the truth of the matter, isn’t it? Death is much too high a price to pay for fun.

✧✧✧

All he can see is black. It’s not his senses fading as the poison overtakes his body, nor is it the encroaching afterlife. Nothing quite so romantic. The blackness is the unforgiving steel of the hydraulic press, a metal sky that extends to each corner of his vision, swallowing everything else. The cold of the press seeps through the silk of Momota’s coat and chills Kokichi’s back, the bumps of his spine that protrude from his body.

He’s always felt like maybe his skin was too thin, stretching tight and unhealthy over a flimsy and frail figure, all those sharp bones sticking out. Gaunt. Made of paper. But all that fragility was nothing compared to now. Nothing compared to the skeletal wash to his face, the hollows in his cheeks and the hateful purple under his eyes like bruises, poison curdling the blood in his veins.

He has almost convinced himself that he can feel the Strike-9 as it travels, a steady and swift loop of _lungs-heart-brain-heart-lungs-heart_ and again. He has always had a knack for finding patterns; there is so much fun to be had in disrupting them.

His breath in his throat is a death-rattle, and foamy red dribbles from the corners of his mouth. Something trickles from the corners of his eyes, too, and his heart lurches, sick in his chest with the fear of it. The fear of dying. He’s not immune to that, after all. As much as he laughs, he has never been so naive as to be unafraid of death. He’s lied about it, of course, but what hasn’t he lied about?

_I didn’t tell Momota this_ , he thinks. _I did not tell him that I am afraid to die._

Just as well. Kokichi had said enough, in those earlier moments in the hangar, before either of them had crawled beneath the press’ heavy weight.

✧✧✧

It didn’t matter what they thought of him.

He _wanted_ them to hate him. It made things easier. Better to save everyone by being hated than to let everyone die, loved.

_You’re alone, Kokichi_ , Saihara had said to him. _And you always will be._

Saihara had always been so good at finding the truth. Here Kokichi lies, in a coffin of his own making, cradled in the coat of someone who hates him. Another person in the room, but Kokichi will never be anything other than alone.

✧✧✧

“Momota,” he says hoarsely. “I’m afraid.”

He can’t see Momota’s expression. He can’t see anything but black.

“I know,” Momota replies. He doesn’t ask of what. “Me too.”

Momota presses a button.

Kokichi inhales.

Above him, the sky begins to descend.


End file.
